Good authors like to remind people that they’ve written something else when people want to talk about eight year old projects. Bad authors like to remind people what they wrote eight years ago. The fact that Maureen has nothing new to offer us has been noticed before.

Maureen’s main focus is to write silly sentences. She’s not so much interested in what those sentences say when put together. For example, she claims that men are “devolving” because they are acting like women. That she just claimed women are lower on the evolutionary scale does not concern Maureen because she’s in it for the sentences. Apparently her editors don’t care if those sentences link together either.

The one thing we can glean from Maureen’s ramblings is that she doesn’t understand evolution. After all, she is just an entertainer using old material.

Devolution is a concept used by people who think “that evolution must mean ‘progress’ to ‘more advanced’ organisms.” The term is mostly used by creationists. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach promoted the theory believing that Adam and Eve both existed, were white, and other ethnicities were a devolution. In his classification of how the various ethnic groups devolved he said “I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian because this stock displays the most beautiful race of men.”

When Maureen does write something intelligent, it’s a good idea to make sure she hasn’t plagiarized it. Despite winning a Pulitzer Prize for writing about Bill Clinton’s blowjob (apparently Pulitzer needs to worry about their standards as well) she hasn’t learned how to credit other writers for their work.

Maureen is either lazy, sloppy, dishonest, or a genuine cunt. Why pick just one?

For those who have low standards and like to cling to the predictable, Maureen Dowd is definitely your woman. Her tactic of belittling men by calling them “girly” is her standard recipe for cheap laughs. She was criticized by Ann Bartow for this tired routine in 2006 and yet here she is trying to tell us it’s still funny in 2013.

I have a theory about Maureen Dowd that explains her columns.

I suspect that Maureen has all of her old articles on a computer program and doesn’t actually write them any more. The computer picks out words and phrases reassembles them for her, then she slaps today’s date on it. That also explains why her articles don’t quite make sense. Garbage in, garbage out.

Maureen Dowd is a bot.

In case you think I’m exaggerating, here are some passages from “Are Men Necessary?” written in 2005 and the comparison passage from her Globe and Mail article in 2013. Let’s play a game called “I don’t see the difference, do you? ”

“[Manly discourse] was, unlike the feminine chatter in the parlor, thought to be impersonal, unemotional, forthright and reasonable.

For centuries, it was widely believed that women’s physical makeup made them emotionally unfit to be leaders.
Dowd, Maureen. Are Men Necessary?. (New York: Berkley Books, 2005), 79

compared to

For centuries, it was widely thought that women were biologically unsuited to hold leadership positions.

You’ll note that the only real change was that she (or the computer program) flipped the order of the sentences and used a thesaurus to alter a couple of words.

Aristotle observed that women’s minds should be kept free from exertion because “children evidently draw on the mother who carries them in her womb, just as plants draw on the soil.” Darwin said that while the female spent her energy forming her ova, the male spent “much force in fierce contests with his rivals.”
Dowd, Maureen. Are Men Necessary?. (New York: Berkley Books, 2005), 80

compared to

Aristotle wrote that women’s minds should be kept free from exertion because “children evidently draw on the mother who carries them in her womb, just as plants draw on the soil.” Darwin observed that while the female spent her energy forming her ova, the male spent “much force in fierce contests with his rivals.”
“Maureen Dowd: Men have not only stopped evolving – they’re devolving”, 2013

She (or the bot) merely changed “observed” to “wrote” and “said” to “observed”.

Even as late as 1970, Dr. Edgar F. Berman, Hubert Humphrey’s personal physician and an official on a national policy-making committee of the Democratic Party, declared that his “scientific position” was that “women are different physically, physiologically and psychically.”

“If doctors do not know that there is such a thing as premenstrual tension,” he huffed, “they’d better go back to medical school.”
Dowd, Maureen. Are Men Necessary?. (New York: Berkley Books, 2005), 80

compared to

Even as late as 1970, after the social revolution of the 60s, Dr. Edgar F. Berman, Hubert Humphrey’s personal physician and an official on a national policy-making committee of the Democratic Party, declared that his “scientific position” was that “women are different physically, physiologically and psychically.” “If doctors do not know that there is such a thing as premenstrual tension,” he said, huffily, “they’d better go back to medical school.”
“Maureen Dowd: Men have not only stopped evolving – they’re devolving”, 2013

The Maureenbot added “after the social revolution of the 60s” and turned “he huffed” into “he said huffily”.

When his words caused a furor among women and he was forced to resign, he ruefully observed: “Pandora’s box is no tender trap.”
But at long last, the tables have turned.
Dowd, Maureen. Are Men Necessary?. (New York: Berkley Books, 2005), 80

The bot got clever here substituting the “forced” part from the original with “stuck to his guns” but loved the last sentence too much to change it. Are bots capable of “love”?

Now it is unstable male temperament that is causing alarm…
Men are engaging in shrewish, scolding, clawing, vengeful, sneaky, vain behaviour that is anything but reasonable and impersonal. Women are affected by lunar tides only once a month; men have raging hormones every day.”
Dowd, Maureen. Are Men Necessary?. (New York: Berkley Books, 2005), 80-1

compared to

Now it is unstable male temperament that is causing alarm.
Male politicians are engaging in sneaky, catty, weepy, ditzy, shrewish behaviour that is anything but reasonable and impersonal.
Women are affected by lunar tides only once a month, after all. Men have raging hormones every day…
“Maureen Dowd: Men have not only stopped evolving – they’re devolving”, 2013

The bot kept “shrewish” and “catty”, changed three adjectives, and dropped one. I guess six adjectives became passé in the last near decade.

I’ll spare you the rest of the article, which is entirely just a copy of 2005’s Chapter Two: Why Pandora’s Box Is No Tender Trap”. Ultimately, the point here is that The Globe and Mail should sue Maureen Dowd for fraud. They paid her for an article “special to The Globe and Mail” and she gave them something already published elsewhere for which she’d already been paid.

To show this isn’t a single transgression, the next article Maureen submitted, “Why the Y?” in The New York Times on November 24th, is barely a rewrite of 2005’s Chapter Four: Why The Well-hung Y Is Wilting, Even As The X Is Excelling. The New York Times needs to fire Maureen Dowd on the grounds that we’ve already read the book.

So, is Maureen Dowd necessary when we’ve got a perfectly good bot doing her job for her?

No.

Maureen is so unnecessary that I debated whether or not to bother writing about her this week. Given her history, I could save my notes, publish it eight weeks or eight years from now, and it would still be just as relevant. At least, this time, Dowd only copy/pasted herself.

Every time a rape is reported a crime has been committed. The crime was either a rape or a false report and police need to determine which one. These crimes don’t sound of equal weight but they are, and here’s why.

Rape can affect the sexual life of a victim for the rest of their lives. A false accusation can affect the sexual life of a victim for the rest of their lives. Rape can cause an innocent person to feel like they are living in a virtual prison. A false allegation can cause an innocent person to live in a literal prison. Rape can cause extreme physical damage or be part of a murder. A false accusation can result in death. Rape can result in post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A false accusation can result in PTSD.

The reason we are asked to listen with compassion to anecdotal evidence of a rape and not anecdotal evidence of false rape accusations is the premise that a woman’s life is more important than a man’s. There is no way around that fact. We are asked to suspend the human, civil right to be presumed innocent because somewhere some woman might be hurt and that chance outweighs the equal hurt that might be done to a man by the accusation. The discussion is cut off by claims that false rape accusations are extremely rare but the reality is that no acceptable empirical studies have ever been done.

The 2% myth and the extended 6-8% mythical allowance are based on guesses. The only attempts at studying the reports with any sort of methodology have resulted in 40-60% false reports. It’s astounding that feminists haven’t conducted proper empirical studies to contradict the best evidence we have. You’d think they’d want proof and they seem so damn sure of themselves so it’s rather telling that they resist making it a fact.

A false accusation of rape is one of the few crimes against which the victim is offered no protection by our current society. In fact, feminists who have lobbied for anonymity of accusers have no interest in providing anonymity for the accused. By insisting that all rape accusations be automatically believed feminists also show they have little regard for presumption of innocence or reasonable doubt which pits feminists against the very foundation of our legal system.

Presumption of innocence is a legal protection offered to all people, and men are people too, which is based on the idea “that most people are not criminals” and “requires that the trier of fact, be it a juror or judge, begin with the presumption that the state is unable to support its assertion.” There is no clause in the constitution that states “unless you are charged with rape.”

Freethought Blogs recently entertained an anecdote that appeals to us to disregard the chances of false rape allegations even though we know they happen and even though we know the rate of false reports is undetermined. This was offered to them as a comment on another member’s blog and it so impressed a member that she featured it with admonishment that 6-8% false report statistics are wrong. I agree they are wrong, but I’m prone to move the number in the higher direction while this person appeals to consider it lower.

EEB is the witness. She says that she was raped but forced to say she made a false accusation, arguing that although she was raped the false accusation stat is elevated by cases like hers. In her story she tells us that police dismissed her because she has a mental illness and “I ‘claimed’ I had been sexually assaulted in the past.” EEB does not claim that the other accusations were true only that this particular story is true. By omission, we can assume the others claims were not true and that she is a false accuser in the past so still a legitimate part of whatever stats may exist “when they wrote their reports.” (There are, as yet, no official reports… but we’re working on that.)

She doesn’t want to tell us what “very flimsy ‘evidence’” they had that she was lying for the reason of not “go[ing] into it because it’s both complicated and ridiculous” but feels like the rest of the story deserves detail. She tells us that the police officer accusing her of lying has a personal history with bipolar women that tainted him against her but she doesn’t think we should be concerned with people’s personal histories, like hers. She tells us that a public awareness campaign was launched after her attack was reported and that they spent months questioning her but also asserts that they never believed her claim or took her seriously.

Here is her claim:
EEB was assaulted by a stranger while walking home. She was left “dripping blood,” torn from vagina to anus and having burns on her labia, and somehow made it home to call the police instead of an ambulance. Her father is apparently a cop so she might have had that number on faster than 911 speed dial.

She recounts that instead of sending an ambulance they sent “detectives.” These detectives told her that the hospital “wasn’t ready” for her and, instead, made her answer questions about her rape and what medication she takes. Though she was in shock and “not thinking much” she had the presence of mind to ask for a female “detective” which they denied her, and then asked for a “rape counselor[sic]” when they finally took her to the hospital. The inflatable hospital that just finished getting ready for her only had one black light to look for evidence and it was broken. They also refused to give her any emergency birth control.

This is truly a monster rapist on the loose. A perineal tear of the third degree usually only happens in childbirth. It should be easy to find a rapist with a cock the girth of a baby’s head and who likely has singe marks on his trousers indicating a penis so hot it can burn labia. Of the copious details given, EEB leaves out the part where she got stitches. You’d think she’d want us to know how many it took. When she was being driven home, the same night, it was by the same “detective” who drove her there. So they released her within the time frame of a work shift.

While claiming that, outside of police, she only told two friends and her family, she states that when the bully cop called the papers because “the community needs to know there was no threat to public safety” it was a form of “public humiliation”. She tells us the police made her re-enact her rape with the bully cop playing the part of the rapist and then the bully cop made her give him a hug after she admitted she made it all up. Her rape counsellor, kept outside of the interrogation room, appeared to be angry with her but, as fate would have it, she ran into said counsellor two years later only to find out that the woman was mad at the cops instead. We all love happy endings.

This counsellor is credited with previously having “kicked major ass. And really helped me through the process; I don’t know what I would have done without her.” Ass kicking just ain’t what it used to be.

EEB says the police questioned her more about her mental illness than about the rape while complaining that “they made me go through what happened” and that she “described the rape more times than I can count,” and “even got on the ground and acted out the rape for them”.

I agree with EEB. I think this case is “both complicated and ridiculous.” The reason that she told this bizarre story is because she wants us to know that false rape statistics are not accurate. Again, I agree with her. EEB would like her anecdote to convince you not to question rape accusations or to consider how many of them may be false but I think she’s accomplished the opposite. I think we need to come up with better tools of analysis and, meanwhile, keep a close eye on all men who have a cock with the circumference of a pineapple.

Anecdotes are the life blood of feminism. They usually contain words and phrases like “shock,” “it never crossed my mind,” “excruciating,” “invasive,” “terrible pain,” “submitted,” “horrific,” “I almost died,” “accusations,” “living hell,” “angry men,” “panic attack,” “humiliation,” “terrorizing,” “he made me,” “over and over and over.” And “I’m not the only one.”

Well, yes, you are.

Surely nobody else knows what it’s like to be EEB. We don’t know why she does the things she does, we don’t know what special false rape accuser support group she goes to in which so many of her friends share the same fate. I’ve never heard of such a group. I’d like to read their minutes. I’d also like to thank EEB for sharing what must have been an extremely emotional story to write. It has given us many reasons to demand a proper method of investigation into all accusations. Something thorough, public, well documented, fair, and respectful of all parties involved.

The law is there for everyone’s protection. It states if there is a reasonable doubt we must not convict.

Hardly a week goes by without the public being told how rape culture and victim blaming are being perpetrated by ‘the patriarchy’. Monday, September 23, 2013 offered us the mother lode of mythical feminist thinking in the form of Una Mullally in The Irish Times.

It’s not that Una said something unique, it’s that she managed to fit so many fallacies into one article that really makes her applause worthy.

Una begins with criticizing police for advising people to “protect yourself from violence” by exercising caution when meeting people online. The reason for this advisory is that a woman’s bones were discovered and the missing woman seems to have met someone via a dating site on the internet before turning up dead. Apparently this is ‘victim blaming’.

I used to get emails all the time from female friends who wanted to forward me the latest warning on how a man might kidnap me by hiding in the back seat of my parked car at the mall. The warnings always came from female friends and they always had my best interests in mind. I never once emailed them back “how dare you blame me for parking my car!” I did start sending all emails to spam if they had “fw:” in the message line but the proper, civilized response is “Thank you. I’ll pass the message along to everyone I know.”

Una, and her ilk, also need some basic lessons in Crime Solving For Dummies. If you watch television at all you might have come across shows like CSI or Criminal Minds in which they portray rather likable, well-meaning detectives who investigate crimes. The first thing they do is ask apparently bizarre questions like “Who, what, where, when, why… and how?”

The answers to these questions help solve crimes.

When a police force investigates someone’s online dating habits it can lead to information, like the identity of the killer. They can also help divulge the method of death, which can help police link one murder to other murders. While they do this investigative work they sometimes have microphones shoved in their faces asking for a public statement in order to inform the people who write and read the news.

The reason police offer warnings to the public are because the public wants to know how they can avoid showing up as a set of bones on the next news report. They get scared. This information is intended to help them feel safer.

“Societies are in a crisis over how men treat women,” Una claims. Now, this is news to me. Society is in a crisis over international wars, terrorism, bank fraud, the resulting economic collapse, and a general lack of faith in either the press, politicians or ‘God’. Most of the women I know are far more concerned with having a bad hair day and failing to look attractive than in having a day where too many men show them unwanted attention.

She claims “potential attackers are rarely instructed to exercise vigilance.” Yes, Una, they are reminded every day by the fucking law. It’s as illegal to commit a crime today as it was yesterday. They are told to not be violent by being faced with jail if they break the law. If we were to instruct them to “be vigilant” we’d be telling them to not get caught. Yelling at him “that’s illegal, you know!” will not solve the problem. You moron.

“Men, don’t rape” is Una’s next solution. This is part of the whole rape culture myth. For some reason, women, like Una, think that other men are in a unique position to give each other rules about sex. They aren’t. If men want sex from women, women are in the unique position to tell them how to go about achieving their goals. What feminists are doing when they tell men that only they can stop rape is basically like a teacher telling a class of inferiors that she will punish the whole class if they don’t tell her who put tacks on her seat.

According to international law, collective punishment is wrong.

The sentiment embedded in the demand for men to fix women’s problems is the idea that men are the problem. The error of this idea, and it’s not Una’s fault for believing this because feminism has ingrained it into her mind, is that men do not live in this world within a cocoon. Boys are born as helpless babies, just as girls are, and we are mostly raised by women.

Though men appear to rule the world, that is because women treat them like gophers: Go get me stuff.

A man’s worth in our world is not assessed on how much wealth he possesses, it is based on the level of happiness of his woman. Every politician knows he’ll do better if he has a happy wife at his side. Don’t be shallow, ask better questions. Why do men commit crimes? I’ll posit this: because they need more stuff to make a woman happy or because they have been rejected by a woman shaming them for not being good enough and feel they have nothing left to lose. Committing a crime has a penalty. They need a reason to risk that penalty. It’s going to be primal. Think… think… are you with me?

The man is the head of the house but the woman is the neck and she can turn the head any way she wants.

Feminists claim that men objectify women but it’s women who think that men are just walking, magical penises and that the penis has the mystical quality of getting them stuff. We’re less concerned with how they get us our stuff than in making sure we get the shit we’re after. One of those things is security so the problem for women is not in how to get men to stop being aggressive, it’s in how to get them to be aggressive but stay out of jail so they can keep providing the stuff that makes us happy.

The problem is not men. Men just want to be loved and respected. What women make them do for that respect is what drives some of them crazy.

“Men, stop hanging your threat of rape over dark streets.” This is Una’s impassioned plea. The streets are only dark if you decide that you have no agency, no power, to affect the world around you. The threat in walking out your door every day exists for both men and women. I’m sorry to inform you, Una, but you could die at any moment. Men face a much greater risk of physical assault every day than women do but they still keep walking out that door.

Being that women are equal, I think we should meet that threat on an equal basis.

What Una claims makes men more culpable is that they all know someone who is “dubious” and goes to strip clubs or pays for sex. Strip clubs are not illegal and I know quite a few women who married for money, so buying sex is apparently quite legal, too, as long as you get the proper paperwork. Una, you and I both know someone who had a baby to avoid having to get a job. You and I both know someone who married a man they didn’t love. Isn’t that just a little bit shady? ‘Dubious behaviour’, perhaps?

Saying that men can stop rape is like telling a driver they can stop all car accidents or investors that they can stop all fraud. Just because men enjoy sex or do it from time to time doesn’t place them in a unique position to police all other participants. Just like Una can’t stop other writers from saying things she disagrees with.

Una claims that “women should be free to talk to whomever they choose and go wherever they want without threat of assault.” That’s bullshit. No one is free to do that. A person is free to leave their home every day and enter the world of the unknown and they should be assured that if something bad happens society will come to their aid to help them heal. Unfortunately, women are not given this freedom because feminists are hell bent on maximizing the pain and trauma of every female experience.

They are busy convincing women who don’t even know if they’ve been raped to call it rape. If you aren’t sure: it didn’t happen. If the woman doesn’t know, how the hell is the guy supposed to have known? They tell women it’s a terrible thing and that they should go to support groups where they relive the pain over and over and over again until all they are is a rape victim. Some of these girls didn’t even know they were raped and could have moved on but now it’s their lifelong identity and they’ll never get over it. What kind of sick fucks are you?

We have become indoctrinated to believe that rape is the worst crime that can be committed. How the hell did that happen? I can think of a bunch of things that are worse: Murder, having my fingers cut off one at a time while I watch, having my limbs disconnected, waking up in an abandoned house with a tape recorder saying “Hello, Diana, I want you to make a choice…” The list can go on. I’ve seen a lot of films. I’ve been raped so that’s not fiction, but my mind (perhaps more creative than that of feminists) can imagine worse scenarios.

Some rapes are extremely violent, leaving women beaten and in hospital with damage to their reproductive organs. These crimes are not just rapes, they are brutal physical assaults that never go unreported and no one laughs. A man can end up with lifelong damage from getting kicked in the groin yet this is comedy to women. While feminists claim that a woman who is drunk can’t consent, they don’t want to address the problem that drunk women can become so sexually aggressive they assault men. I have a friend who has serious problems after a fall-down drunk friend he was trying to keep safe by taking her home grabbed his testicles in a sexual advance, squeezing so hard he had to go to the hospital. This guy wasn’t trying to rape her, he was trying to keep her from having sex.

Drunk girls are not fun and they are not weak.

Drunk women are responsible if they decide to drive themselves home and get in an accident while doing so. They are equally responsible if they make the decision to have sex. I hear Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is a crazy ass bunch of sisters if you try to challenge them on that.

While feminists claim that a rape culture exists which ‘normalizes’ rape, I insist that a feminist culture exists that ‘rape-ifies’ normal sex. The definition of rape has now been expanded to include when a woman doesn’t say no but thinks it, when a woman decides that sex didn’t go the way she wanted, when a woman has had a few drinks, when a woman is woken up with sex after falling asleep next to a man she has previously had sex with and decided to stay in the bed… The list will continue to grow until we stop it.

Perhaps this is too much information but, for me, sex is my favorite way to wake up. Men have every right to believe that a woman sleeping in the bed next to them is going to be happily awoken. If you don’t want sex, don’t sleep in their fucking bed. We are not children here.

Women don’t own sex, it’s something people do together. It requires communication. Women don’t like it when men lie to them to get sex and men don’t like it when women lie either. It happens both ways. “Yes, I’ll use a condom” or “Yes, I’m on birth control.” There is no one-sided game, it can happen to either gender. If a woman lies with her body language and her actions she is raping the man. Sex is not a written contract. It is something that only the people present can attest to, it happens organically, intuitively and it is something over which people can make mistakes. Men don’t need need an ’emphatic yes’ to avoid rape, you need to give them an emphatic ‘no’. If you think you didn’t have the option to say ‘stop’, you are wrong.

The original case in discussion with Una Mallally’s article (before she made it a rape culture issue) was a woman who decided to go to a fetish site (note that a woman ‘normalized’ SM fetishes with her book Fifty Shades of Grey, probably influencing the dead woman’s choices) and met with someone who ended up killing her. What we don’t know, and don’t need to know, is whether or not the murder was the prime objective or whether the fetish scene accidentally led to her death and the partner tried to cover it up. That’s a job for the police. What we do know is that meeting people in real life whom you only know from online is a dangerous prospect and that the police warnings are extremely good advice.

Women are not free to exit their doors and expect to return safely any more than men are. Every day you wake up and exit the house be happy that you are alive and be happy when you return safely. In the meantime, there are many things you can do to reduce your anxiety: choose to be fearless, choose to be cautious, choose to not leave your house… or the fifty shades of grey in between. The choice is yours and no one is taking that away from you. Women and men both face this risk but, for some reason, only women seem intent on blaming men for all their problems.